What comes after you kill the NSO?
Scrapping an unfavourable survey on falling consumer expenditure is the latest assault on India’s statistical machinery. If it continues on this path, where will the government go to find credible data for policymaking?
Why read this story?
Editor's note: P.C. Mohanan wasn’t surprised at all with the news on 15 November. A career statistician for over 30 years and a former acting chairman of the National Statistical Commission, Mohanan had learnt to read between the lines. And interpret silences. Especially that of governments about economic data during a downturn. Particularly when a council of ministers goes overboard insisting that all is well with the economy. Mohanan has been through it all. The last time such a situation arose and the government kept delaying the release of a periodic jobs survey by the National Sample Survey Office, or NSSO, he resigned in protest, in January this year. So, he suspected all along that something wasn’t right with the 2017-18 consumer expenditure survey, which the government hadn’t released yet. Then the findings of the survey made their way to a news report. India woke up that Friday morning to yet another set of dismal consumer spending numbers in its long list of economic woes, pointing at a deepening slowdown. The Business Standard report said that consumer expenditure in India declined in 2017-18 …
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